In all of these difficult new problems, progressive forces—particularly the joint powers of feminism and gay rights—may seem like crusaders for openness and tolerance. They are in fact promoters of a new morality based on the principle of consent. I share this morality, I should add. It is an enlightened humanistic morality, based on personal dignity and the sanctity of rational choice. But the triumph of consent as a guiding principle to distinguish good and bad sexuality has a host of unintended consequences, which we live through in our bodies. Pornography is only the subterranean example.
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The most obvious consequence of the rise of choice-centered, consent-based morality, and it has to be said the most important, is that sex has become much healthier, much less shameful, and, if not much better, a great deal less tortured.
Not that you would believe it from reading most reporting on the subject. The explosion of wild and dangerous promiscuity is a staple of the think-piece. Vanity Fair ran an article in October 2012 on the impact of porn and social media on teenagers. Because of porn, the author claimed, young women feel pressured to post explicit images online, to behave like actresses in porn films. “When you have sex with a guy, they want it to be like a porno,” a nineteen-year-old girl said. “They want anal and oral right away.” Such articles may make for unsettling reading, but they are based almost exclusively on anecdotal evidence. The empirical evidence should comfort the hearts of the most conservative of old-timers. In a world overwhelmed by porn, the U.S. teenage pregnancy rate is declining precipitously. In 2011 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that, for the first time, teenagers who had had sex were in the minority. Teenagers wait longer to have sex, and for the right reasons: either because it is “against their religion or morals” or because “they had not yet found the right person.” They may talk about ten-dollar blowjobs in their school bathroom or enforced orgies as initiation for the cool kids, but the best evidence we have suggests a trend the other way. The Internet Age, for teenagers, is an age of relative prudery.
Once people start having sex, however, they really have sex. It is great that men and women have time to try each other out, as Bubbe Helen said. The 2010 National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior from Indiana University showed how thoroughly they are doing so. As recently as 1992 oral sex was considered “surprisingly ubiquitous.” By their late twenties over 90 percent of women have performed fellatio, 50 percent in the past month. The same goes for men and cunnilingus. Experimenting with homosexuality and straight anal sex are on the rise too. In 1992, 16 percent of women between eighteen and twenty-four said they’d tried anal sex; in 2015 the rate was 40 percent for women between the ages of twenty and twenty-four.
So, on the one hand, young men and women are waiting longer to have sex. They are having sex for better reasons. When they do have sex, they have sex with less shame and are more open to all avenues of pleasure. What has happened to us, in a phrase, is that we have become sensible about sex. We have made sex rational. We should celebrate.
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The horrors of pornography have emerged in the context of this world of sensible sex, a nightmare underlying our newfound rationality. The effect of all this porn should be enormously negative. The old second-wave feminist dictum “Pornography is the theory, and rape is the practice” is still largely accepted. There were extensive studies into the effect of pornography on individuals during the so-called feminist sex wars of the 1980s and 1990s. In one early study, undertaken in 1982, researchers at the University of Indiana asked 160 undergraduates to watch a series of films. Some sat through standard educational or entertainment material, but others saw short movies that contained “fellatio, cunnilingus, coition, and anal intercourse.” One group saw six porn films a week, for a period of six weeks—a total of almost five hours of sexually explicit material. After completing this porn marathon, the students were asked to read a newspaper account of a man who picked up and raped a female hitchhiker. They learned from the story that the man had been convicted and were asked to suggest a suitable sentence for his crime. Men who had seen the mainstream movies wanted to jail the rapist for almost eight years; those who watched the sex scenes suggested a sentence just over half as long. Exposure to large amounts of pornography, the researchers concluded, “trivializes rape through the portrayal of women as hyperpromiscuous and socially irresponsible.”
Other researchers interviewed rapists and found that the effects implied by the Indiana study appear to apply to real life. One team, who talked to 341 sex offenders, found that pornography “added significantly to the prediction of recidivism.” Another group discovered that many convicted rapists had been exposed to hard-core pornography before high school. One rapist told a researcher that after watching a pornographic film: “That’s when I started having rape fantasies. . . . I just went for it, went out and raped.”
These results have been replicated numerous times in the past thirty years, and the arguments for the dangers of pornography have formed into a coherent whole. In her 2012 book, Violence and the Pornographic Imaginary, the sociologist Natalie Purcell provides a summary: “Exposure to pornography has . . . been linked to alarming attitudes toward women, toward sexual violence, and toward rape victims. Several studies suggest that one’s level of exposure to pornography is positively correlated with acceptance of ‘rape myths’ and victim-blaming attitudes or beliefs that trivialize rape. The most disturbing studies on exposure to sexually explicit material suggest that self-reported level of pornography exposure is related to history of rape and propensity to rape.” Given that every man on earth has been exposed to this imagery, much of which is violent, we should in theory be terrified for the future of the world’s sexual practices. If nearly every boy and man is exposed to violent pornography, and pornography leads to sexual violence, then the flood of pornography with which the Internet floods male consciousness should lead to an epidemic of rape and sexual violence.
Except that the opposite happens. As early as 2006 the economist Todd Kendall conducted a state-by-state study comparing high-speed Internet access and rape rates. He concluded that “a 10 percentage point increase in Internet access is associated with a decline in reported rape victimization of around 7.3 percent.” The Kendall study does not directly connect the use of porn with lower rape rates, only high-speed Internet access and rape. High-speed Internet access doesn’t correspond to any other declining crime rates, however. Also, the decline of the rape rate corresponds exactly to those groups—that is, fourteen- to eighteen-year-olds—for whom Internet pornography represents the greatest leap in ease of access. Kendall suggests pornography is a “substitute” for rape.
Studies conducted before the rise of the Internet found no connection between pornography and rape. In 1991 Berl Kutchinsky of the Institute of Criminal Science at the University of Copenhagen undertook a broad study in Denmark, Sweden, and West Germany during the period 1964–84. The availability of pornography, including violent pornography, in those countries rose dramatically over that time. Yet in none of the countries did rape increase more than nonsexual violent crimes. “This finding in itself would seem sufficient to discard the hypothesis that pornography causes rape,” concluded Kutchinsky.
A team that studied pornography access and sex crimes in Japan found an inverse correlation: “The number and availability of sexually explicit materials increased in Japan over the years 1972–95. At the same time, the incidence of rape declined from 4,677 cases with 5,464 offenders in 1972 to 1,500 cases with 1,160 offenders in 1995.” Pornography had an even more marked effect on juvenile sexual assault rates.
A pornography paradox is emerging: When huge quantities of violent sexual imagery flood male consciousness, real sexual violence either stays the same or declines.
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The antipornography crusades in Iceland and Britain are not empirically based attempts to decrease sexual violence against women. They are moral panics. They indulge a visceral
but insubstantial outrage, the widespread lament “What is happening to men?” Specifically “What is happening to young men?” In the past the same crude fear and self-righteous piety we see today in the attacks against porn manifested in attempts to curb rap music and video games. The underlying assumption in all these debates has remained ludicrously simplistic: representations of violence are violence, and representations of violence lead to violence.
Andrea Dworkin, the gender theorist whose explosive work on pornography in the early 1970s began the sex wars, was the first writer to frame pornography as a feminist moral issue: “The major theme of pornography as a genre is male power, its nature, its magnitude, its use, its meaning.” Her hatred of male power consumed her, and ultimately consumed the debate around pornography. Her enemies were not in error; they were evil. Her Pornography Resource Center staged “porn drives” in which women smuggled porn out of their homes. When one woman set herself on fire in protest against porn, the PRC compared her to the anti-Vietnam protester Norman Morrison and claimed her self-immolation was “an act of political protest” undertaken in the name of women living “under conditions of political and sexual terrorism.”
The rise of radical feminism was a “great awakening” in tune with the other great religious revivals of American history. Campaigns against “demon rum” are the direct ancestors of the campaigns against “demon porn.” When Dworkin lectured, one spectator later wrote, “her left arm shook in the air, tears stained the spaces around her eyes into violet saucers.”
Moral panic over male sexuality predates the rise of modern pornography by millennia. The Zohar makes onanism a worse crime than murder, and for Christians masturbation was a mortal sin, both an unnatural act and one condemned by scripture. Jean Stengers and Anne Van Neck’s Masturbation: The History of a Terror collects these moral panics, each abetted by horrific stories about the outcome of masturbation. There is the story of two onanists in the Bonum Universale de Apibus by Thomas of Cantimpré, an allegorical social commentary from the thirteenth century: “One of these unfortunates died while screaming, ‘May God’s vengeance be upon me! May God’s vengeance be upon me!’ God’s anger, in the face of this abject sin, manifested itself not only through divine retribution but through miracles, which functioned as so many warnings. It is thus, he told us, that a masturbator, having tried, with guilty intentions, to grasp his penis, suddenly felt a snake in his hand. Thomas abominated ‘the heinousness of this sin.’ ”
The religious loathing of masturbation was transferred into a secular framework during the Enlightenment. Samuel-August Tissot’s L’Onanisme was hugely popular in the eighteenth century, going through hundreds of reprints and many translations. Tissot, a physician, claimed, “This deadly habit kills more youth than all diseases combined.” His list of the side effects of masturbation included loss of memory, dementia, anxiety, “continual anguish,” dizzy spells, weakening of all senses, insomnia and nightmares, coughing fits, low fevers, consumption, headaches and stomach pains, rheumatism, pimples, gonorrhea, priapism, tumors of the testes, sterility, constipation, diarrhea, and hemorrhoids. Thus the need for preventative undergarments, for “toothed urethral rings,” for bells attached to penises which tinkled at erections.
The abjection of male desire was by no means the invention of radical feminists on New York street corners in the 1970s. It was a commonplace of medical literature for most of history in the Christian West. The strength and depth of that abjection is visible in the strong resistance the group of researchers who founded the Journal of Porn Studies in England has endured. Before a single article had been presented, its potential existence provoked wild fury; the group Stop Porn Culture accused them of being “promoters of porn culture.” Gail Dines, the author of Pornland, described the founders of the journal as “akin to climate change deniers.” Antiporn activists fear the moral muddiness that knowledge inevitably brings, as all moralists do. The connection the feminists against porn wish to draw is simple: Image leads to the perversion of male desire, which leads to violent men, which leads to violence against women generally. A “Journal of Porn Culture” will naturally problematize and complicate and blur every line in that diagram. That’s what scholarship does.
For a force so utterly transformative, the research we currently have, though full of fascinating hints, is sketchy and incomplete. Research into pornography has so far suffered from several discrete problems, some methodological, some social. Old-fashioned moral prurience stigmatizes it. The technological novelty is confusing. We don’t really know what the Internet is doing to us; how can we know what the combination of sex and the Internet is doing to us? And then Internet pornography itself is in a state of intense flux, changing month by month. Research into Internet porn, in short, is like trying to hit a moving target in the dark with your eyes half-closed.
The empirical evidence we do have about pornography is confusing, not just the evidence on violence. For example, it is a truism that pornography corrodes the capacity for sexual and personal intimacy. But a recent study comparing the answers of 164 men to the Perceived Interpersonal Closeness Scale and the Pornography Use Information Questionnaire found “no definite link between the self-reported use of pornography and perceived interpersonal closeness.” Instead the study found that “pornography use was not just an escape from intimacy but also an expression of the search for it.” Even sexual permissiveness, which correlates with greater pornography use, is subject to all kinds of factors besides mere exposure. In a 2013 report self-described liberals grew significantly more sexually permissive after watching porn, while self-described conservatives grew slightly less permissive. The report’s conclusion? “Preexisting beliefs moderate the attitudinal application of activated sexual scripts.” If the effects of watching porn depend on something as vague as the political views of its spectators, what other possible factors might apply?
It only gets more confusing. In one study of teenagers’ use of pornography and its relationship to their sexual development, the researchers could find few correlations of any kind. The porn itself didn’t seem to matter so much as the context of the person consuming the porn. If we are not capable of judging pornography by its effects, then by what standard are we to judge it?
The deeper the research into Internet pornography, the less confident, the more tentative the conclusions become. The crudity of abjection remains. The political debate is at present a thoughtless return to primordial fear of the brutality of male libido. This fear, and the pseudo-morality that seizes upon it, prevents us from seeing how culture and politics and economics modulate the link, if any, between pornography and sexual violence. The simplistic idea that porn causes sexual violence, promoted by radical conservatives and radical feminists alike, obscures the issue. Fear prevents us from thinking.
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Not that fear is an inappropriate response to Internet pornography. The sheer disgust porn creates is entirely understandable; indeed disgust itself is one of the primary experiences of its consumers. In her book on pornography, Dworkin’s first example is an issue of Penthouse with women splayed on trucks like shot deer. Compared to what is currently available, women as corpses seems naïvely sweet. It’s almost pastoral.
The scope and intensity of Internet pornography is shocking. And being shocked is part of the experience. You may enjoy watching busty blondes giving blowjobs, but shemales are there too. As are women splayed in Mengele-style medical equipment, women with their faces covered in the cum of a hundred men, cartoon monster porn, stepfather-stepdaughter sex. Any given viewer of Pornhub is at the very least aware that millions and millions of his fellow men want to see incestuous acts simulated. And those are the videos on free porn sites, sites that are intended as teasers for the truly hard-core material that has to be paid for. Never mind the material that is illegal.
The porn habits of men are bizarre, even in the tangential, partial picture we currently have. The most popular porn star in the world, by far, ac
cording to Pornhub’s Insight research page, is forty-two-year-old Lisa Ann. Individuals tend to search for women of their own nationality. In the United States ebony is the most popular search term, after massage. PornMD provides a live stream of searches on its various free websites. It’s a sometimes chilling, sometimes bizarre point of access to male sexuality. Sometimes it’s funny: My Little Pony pornography is most popular in Belarus and Russia. Here’s a list of the terms viewers were searching during the three minutes I spent on the site: youth, ember, massage creep, sorority hazing fuck, horse and girl, german rough pis [sic], pleasant anal, hungry grandmas, deepthroat gag choke punk, hijab, diaper, prostate blow job, mom son porn ebony, eat dung, wetplay gay marie, man, Japanese invisible man, hot girl panty pooping, Russian money, big ass little guy, African native tribes, welsh, granny squirter, casting road sex, milk enema, snake sex, Bengali muslim, gynecology model, iceporn taboo, red bone sleeping underwear, huge cartoon cock, public humility, fuck the librarian. That’s three minutes. Male desire is a shape-shifting beast. The male gaze has absolutely nothing to do with the pretty pictures in Vogue.
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